The Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest

Participants in the Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest workshop at the University of Warwick and others alert to the importance of aesthetics in politics are looking at emotion in politics and how it is so effectively harnessed for political purposes through art.

The state needs the discipline of that smooth consistency, which is embedded in national culture and is displayed through the aesthetics both of everyday rituals and hyper-visible ceremonies, of flags and the ceremonies to unfurl or take them down, of art reflecting the political imaginations of the state elites.

However, political imaginaries are not just those of the powerful, of course. Equally important are the ways in which the aesthetics of power are employed in everyday objects of use, such as calendars, leisure, film, museums and public displays of art, and modes of communication such as humour and vulgarity, ‘the grotesque’ as Achille Mbembe has called it. Aesthetics has developed across these historical boundaries not in any linear way but through struggles of and for meanings and also through reciprocity and intercultural dialogue. Read more...

Today, the British Museum’s Trustees
argue that the Parthenon sculptures are “integral to the Museum’s purpose as a worldmuseumtelling
the story of human cultural achievement.” But what does history tell us?

Critical issues of domination, discrimination and
gender find powerful articulation in the expressionist imagination of dalit
artist, Savindra Sawakar. His work traces the dense contradictions and acute sensuousness
of social worlds, past and present.

For the Kenyan novelist,
playwright and essayist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, power through cultural subjugation was the
principal tool of colonialism. The monuments of Nairobi can be read as a history
of cultural artefacts used by the coloniser to dominate and subjugate the
colonised.

Can
atlases serve to empower those at the bottom of the pyramid, permitting an
understanding of historical change, social developments and a more critical
awareness of regional, national traditions and resources?

Two types of spectacle – procession and tableau vivant – in the Judges
Service at London’s Westminster Abbey, allow us to explore a ‘live’ performance
of judicial authority outside the usual stage setting for its performances.

The tapestry and the murals are part of the
complex and multi-layered ‘archi-texture’ of the parliamentary buildings, which
continue to echo with older articulations of power and what the nation is and should be.

For
politics not to be a dirty word that reflected the failing political class’s
capacity for endless debates and conservative behaviour, it had to play a role
much more active and daring; politics was supposed to change a society’s whole
way of living and thinking.